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The history of art is a sequence of successful transgressions.

Susan Sontag

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Susan Sontag
Age: 71 †
Born: 1933
Born: January 16
Died: 2004
Died: December 28
Author
Essayist
Feminist
Film Critic
Film Director
Historian
Human Rights Activist
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Opinion Journalist
New York City
New York
Susan Rosenblatt
Transgressions
Transgression
Sequence
Successful
History
Art

More quotes by Susan Sontag

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The fantasies inspired by TB in the last century, by cancer now, are responses to a disease thought to be intractable and capricious--that is, a disease not understood--in an era in which medicine's central premise is that all diseases can be cured.
Susan Sontag
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Books are not only the arbitrary sum of our dreams, and our memory. They also give us the model of self-transcende nce.
Susan Sontag
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The destiny of photography has taken it far beyond the role to which it was originally thought to be limited: to give more accurate reports on reality (including works of art). Photography is the reality the real object is often experienced as a letdown.
Susan Sontag
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Depression is melancholy minus its charms - the animation, the fits.
Susan Sontag
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The fear of becoming old is born of the recognition that one is not living now the life that one wishes.
Susan Sontag
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Finally, the most grandiose result of the photographic enterprise is to give us the sense that we can hold the whole world in our heads – as an anthology of images. To collect photographs is to collect the world
Susan Sontag
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One could plausibly argue that it is for quite sound reasons that the whole capacity for sexual ecstasy is inaccessible to most people - given that sexuality is something, like nuclear energy, which may prove amenable to domestication through scruple, but then again may not.
Susan Sontag
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Images have been reproached for being a way of watching suffering at a distance, as if there were some other way of watching.
Susan Sontag
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We are ruled by quotations.
Susan Sontag
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Although none of the rules for becoming more alive is valid, it is healthy to keep on formulating them.
Susan Sontag
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I have been told that I am a natural feminist, someone who was born a feminist. In fact I was quite blind to what the problem was: I couldn't understand why anyone would hesitate to do what they wanted to do just because they were told that women didn't do such things.
Susan Sontag
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Ours is an age which consciously pursues health, and yet only believes in the reality of sickness.
Susan Sontag
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We are told we must choose - the old or the new. In fact, we must choose both. What is a life if not a series of negotiations between the old and the new?
Susan Sontag
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How boring just to be a body.
Susan Sontag
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With more people, there are more voices to tune out.
Susan Sontag
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It is easier to endure than to change. But once one has changed, what was endured is hard to recall.
Susan Sontag
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That's what a community is: taking for granted certain assumptions, not having to start from zero every time. This is no longer true.
Susan Sontag
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In America, the photographer is not simply the person who records the past, but the one who invents it.
Susan Sontag
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Mad people = People who stand alone and burn. I'm attracted to them because they give me permission to do the same.
Susan Sontag
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One set of messages of the society we live in is: Consume. Grow. Do what you want. Amuse yourselves.
Susan Sontag